1 6. 2^2<- 



TWO COLLEGE ESSAYS 
BY L. B. R. BRIGGS 

HABIT 
BY WILLIAM JAMES 



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BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 



By transfer 
The White House 
Uarch 3rd, i^l^ 



\ 



TWO COLLEGE ESSAYS 
BY L. B. R» BRIGGS 

HABIT 

BY WILLIAM JAMES 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 

(3I)e mitin^iHe Tj^tt^ Cambribge 



H'2.":3 






CONTENTS 



L. B. R. BRIGGS 

fathers, mothers, and freshmen 

from " school, college, and 
character" 

the mistakes of college life 
" routine and idi 

WILLIAM JAMES 
A PART OF THE CHAPTER ON HABIT 



COPYRIGHT, I9OI AND I9O4, BY LE BARON RUSSELL BRIGGS 
COPYRIGHT, 1S9O, BY HENRY HOLT AND CO. 



i: 






FOREWORD 

When a Senior looks back over his 
college course^ it is often with a two- 
fold sense of regret. He has left undone 
many things he wishes he had done, and 
done many things he would gladly see 
undone. He realizes that the irrevoc- 
able opportunities have been wasted, or 
only partly used. Perhaps the loafer's 
self-justifying argument, that meeting 
men is after all the great opportunity of 
college, has deluded him into forgetting 
that it is only one of many opportunities. 
Beyond all this he remembers that the 
temptations incident to the young man's 
new-found freedom were not always 
resisted. 

And the Senior thinks that if the 
Freshman had only had his wisdom, the 
story would have been very different ; 
and so it would have been, for in the last 



analysis all shortcomings are due to a 
lack of appreciation of relative values. 

No amount of good advice can give 
to the Freshman the Senior's wisdom. 
Experience is the great teacher. Never- 
theless, boys who think can still learn 
much from precept and more from ex- 
ample, and this consideration has seemed 
to justify the compilation of this pam- 
phlet. It has been printed for private dis- 
tribution at the instance of a few college 
graduates,^ who want to send to young 
men just going to college what they 
believe to be a useful and an inspiring 
message. 

And it is further hoped that the 
pamphlet may prove valuable to parents ; 
bringing home to them anew the import- 
ance of those functions that cannot pos- 
sibly be delegated, and of that mutual 
understanding which proves such a bul- 
wark to their sons in time of stress. 

This little volume was first printed in 

' Information concerning this pamphlet can be obtained by 
communicating with R. B. Cutting, 32 Nassau St., New Ycfrk. 



1909, though the contents have under- 
gone a slight change. 

Grateful acknowledgments are due to 
Messrs. Houghton Mifflin Co. (pub- 
lishers, 4 Park St., Boston, Mass.) for 
their permission to reprint extracts from 
"Routine and Ideals'' and from "School, 
College and Character'' by Dean Briggs; 
also to Messrs. Henry Holt & Co. 
(publishers, 34 West 33d St., New 
York) for their permission to reprint a 
part of the chapter on " Habit" from the 
" Principles of Psychology " by William 
James (two volumes, I5.00 net). The 
kindness of Dean Briggs and of Mr. 
Henry James, Jr., in giving their per- 
mission is also greatly appreciated. 

New York, May, igi2. 



FROM 

SCHOOL, COLLEGE AND 

CHARACTER 



SCHOOL, COLLEGE, AND 
CHARACTER 

I 

FATHERS, MOTHERS, AND FRESHMEN 

BY virtue of the authority commit- 
ted to me," says President EHot 
on Commencement Day, " I confer on 
you the first degree in Arts; and to 
each of you I give a diploma which 
admits you, as youth of promise, to the 
fellowship of educated men." The col- 
lege sends her alumni into the world 
with nothing more than a warrant that 
they are presentable intellectually. Yet 
her unwritten and unspoken purpose is 
not so much intellectual as moral ; and 
her strongest hope is to stamp her gradu- 
ates with an abiding character. A col- 
lege stands for learning, for culture, and 
for power ; in particular, it stands for the 



2 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

recognition of an aim higher than money* 
getting. It is a place where our young 
men shall see visions ; where even the 
idlest and lowest man of all must catch 
glimpses of ideals which, if he could see 
them steadily, would transfigure life. 
The Bachelor of Arts is seldom, on his 
Commencement Day, a scholar either 
polished or profound ; but he may be in 
the full sense of the word a man. 

Though the responsibility of the Alma 
Mater for the manhood of her sons gets 
little formal recognition, whoever loves 
her feels it none the less, and knows that 
her good name depends not so much on 
her children's contributions to learning 
as on their courtesy, their efficiency, their 
integrity, and their courage. The college 
herself, as represented by her governing 
bodies, feels this deeply, in a general way, 
but does not know and cannot find out 
how far her responsibility reaches into 
details. Intellectual discipline she pro- 
fesses and must provide, — subjects of 



AND CHARACTER 3 

study old and new ; instructors that know 
their subjects and can teach them : and 
she is happy if she has money enough to 
/ make these things sure. Thus beyond 
' what is spent for the chapel and for the 
maintenance of decent order in the pre- 
mises there can be little visible outlay for 
the protection and the development of a 
student's character. Nor can the forma- 
tion of character, except as affected by 
courses in ethics, be measured out and 
paid for by the hour or by the job ; and 
thus the college can do little more than 
trust in the awakening of intellectual in- 
terests to drive out the trivial and the 
base, in the often unconscious influence 
of men of character among its Faculty, 
and in the habits and standards of con- 
duct already acquired at school and at 
home. Now and then a college teacher 
rejects all responsibility outside of the 
classroom. " My business," he says, " is 
to teach men : if the students are not 
men, I don't want them in my classes; 



4 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

if they don't care to learn, let them go 
their own way. What becomes of them 
is no business of mine ; and if they have 
to leave college, so much the better for 
the college and for them. The first, 
last, and only duty of a teacher in a uni- 
versity is to advance the knowledge of 
his subject ; he is false to his trust, if he 
spends time and strength in patching up 
worthless boys who have no place in an 
institution of learning." 

This doctrine, seldom enunciated by 
men that have sons and happily never 
lived down to, is the natural refuge of 
professors who see the opposition between 
the advancement of learning and concern 
for their pupils' character, and who, with 
the enthusiasm of the investigator and 
the teacher, have time and strength for 
nothing more. Nor is the professor the 
only interested person that would shift 
the responsibility. Those parents who 
have turned their children over succes- 
sively to the governess, the little boys' 



AND CHARACTER 5 

school, and the big boys' school, turn 
them over in time to the college. The 
college, they admit, has its dangers ; yet 
it is the only thing for a gentleman's 
sons at a certain time in their lives, and 
the risk must be taken. The business 
of the college they patronize is, like the 
business of the schools they have patron- 
ized, to develop, cultivate, and protect 
their sons, whom, to put it in their own 
language, they " confide " to the college 
for that purpose. " I sent my boy to 
college," writes the mother of a lazy 
little Freshman that has come to grief, 
"and I supposed he would be looked 
out for." " Write me a good long letter 
about my Darling," says another. " I 
want my boy to be up and washed at 
eight," says a careful father. " Please 
send me every week an exact record of 
my son's absences," a suspicious father 
writes to the dean, — and the dean won- 
ders what would become of himself, his 
stenographer, and his ostensible duties 



6 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

if all parents should ask for consideration 
on this same scale. 

*' Some things are of that nature as to make 
One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache ; '* 

and often such appeals as I have cited, 
though superficially amusing, belong to 
the sad phenomena of the college world ; 
for they imply parental distrust at the 
very time when a youth, just entering 
the larger life and the fiercer temptations 
of early manhood, needs, beyond all other 
human helps, a relation with father and 
mother of long-tried and perfect trust. 
They imply, also, parents' ignorance of 
children's character. 

To the dean of a large college, who 
has most to do with students and their 
parents in all academic sorrows, it soon 
becomes clear that parents are account- 
able for more undergraduate shortcom- 
ings than they or their sons suspect, — 
and this after liberal allowance for faults 
in the college and its officers. " I have 



AND CHARACTER 7 

spent an hour to-day with Jones's father," 
said a college president in a formidable 
case of discipline. " I have conceived a 
better opinion of the son after meeting 
the father," — and the experience is re- 
peated year by year. Five minutes, or 
two minutes, with a father or a mother 
may reveal the chief secret of a young 
man's failure or misconduct, and may 
fill the heart of an administrative officer 
with infinite compassion. " You say he 
gambles," says a loud, swaggering father. 
" Well, what of it ? Gentlemen always 
play cards." " I told my boy," says a 
father of a different stamp, " that I did 
not myself believe in [what is commonly 
called " vice "] ; but that if he went into 
that sort of thing, he must not go off 
with the crowd, but must do it quietly 
in a gentlemanly way." 

Hereditary and home influence less 
palpable, but quite as pervasive and nearly 
as demoralizing, is that of the trivially 
biographic mother, who, while a dozen 



8 SCHOOL, COLLE GE, 

men are waiting at the dean's office door, 
assures the dean that her son, now on 
trial for his academic life, " was a lovely 
baby," and who, so to speak, grows up 
with him then and there, tracking him 
step by step, with frequent counter- 
marches, to his present station ; or of 
the mother who insinuates that the father 
(whose ambassador she is) has been less 
competent and wise than she, and that 
her son gets from the father's family 
offensive traits which she hopes will be 
kept under by the sterling merits that 
he gets from her own ; or of the father 
who is tickled by the reminiscences of 
his own youth that are evoked when his 
son is caught stealing a poor shopkeep- 
er's sign ; or of the father who suggests 
that the college should employ at his 
expense a detective against his son ; or 
of the father who, when his son is sus- 
pended from the university, keeps him 
in a neighboring city, at any cost and 
with any risk and with any amount of 



AND CHARACTER 9 

prevarication, rather than take him home 
and let the neighbors suspect the truth ; 
or of the father who at a crucial moment 
in the life of a wayward son goes to Eu- 
rope for pleasure (though, to do him 
justice, he has been of little use at home) ; 
or of the father who argues that his son's 
love of drink cannot be hereditary, since 
he himself had straightened out before 
his son was born. 

The best safeguard of a young man 
in college — better even than being in 
love with the right kind of girl — is a 
perfectly open and affectionate relation 
to both parents, or to the one parent or 
guardian that represents both. In saying 
this, I presuppose parents and guardians 
of decent character, and capable of open 
and affectionate relations. One of the 
surprises in administrative life at college 
is the underhand dealing of parents, not 
merely with college officers, but with 
their own sons. " Your son's case is just 
where I cannot tell whether or no it will 



10 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

be wise to put him on probation," says 
the dean to a well-educated and agreeable 
father. " It will do him good," says the 
father emphatically. " Then," says the 
dean, " we will put him on ; " and the 
father, as he takes his leave, observes, 
" I shall give him to understand that it 
was inevitable, — that / did all / could 
to prevent it." Now and then a father 
writes to the dean for an opinion of a 
son's work and character. The dean 
would like to tell the son of the inquiry 
and to show him the answer before send- 
ing it, so that everything, favorable or 
unfavorable, may be aboveboard ; but he 
has, or thinks he has, the father's con- 
fidence to keep. Accordingly he says 
nothing to the student concerned, answers 
the father straightforwardly, and learns 
later that his letter, if unfavorable, has 
passed from the father to the son without 
comment, as if it had been a gratuitous 
emanation from the dean's office. The 
letter may be garbled. In answer to the 



AND CHARACTER ii 

inquiry of a distinguished man about his 
ward, the dean of a college made clear, 
first, that the young man had been in 
danger of losing his degree, and next 
that the danger was probably over. The 
distinguished man had the unfavorable 
part of the letter copied, omitted the fa- 
vorable, and sent the partial copy to the 
student. He omitted the dean's signa- 
ture : but the letter itself showed whence 
it came ; and it appeared to have been 
written just after the dean had assured 
the student of his belief that the degree 
was safe. The young man was frank 
enough and sensible enough in his per- 
plexity to go straight to the dean ; but 
the false position of the distinguished 
man and the false position in which (to 
some degree unwittingly) he would have 
left the dean before the student are clear. 
It is absolutely essential to successful 
college government that executive offi- 
cers should be square rather than " poli- 
tic," and should be outspoken, so far as 



12 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

they can be without breaking anybody's 
confidence. At best, it is scarcely possible 
to make the younger students see that 
the main purpose of a disciplinary officer 
is not the detection of wrongdoers, by 
fair means or by foul ; and it is quite im- 
possible for such an officer to be above 
suspicion in the eyes of students while 
parents assume that he is either a partner 
or a rival in disingenuous dealing. 

Sometimes father and son combine to 
keep a mother in ignorance; and fre- 
quently that great principle of parental 
relation — that father or mother will for- 
give all and will love in spite of all, but 
will be most deeply wounded unless 
trusted — is not recognized by one par- 
ent toward another, or by the son toward 
either. In cases of almost total want of 
previous acquaintance, cases of parents 
who complain of vacation at boarding- 
school because it leaves their children 
on their hands, this is not to be wondered 
at ; but in the everyday father, willing 



AND CHARACTER 13 

to give his children the best of all he has, 
a profound ignorance of his son's acts, 
motives, and character must be rooted in 
some deep mistake, not of heart, but of 
judgment. That such ignorance exists 
is plain : it attributes truth to the tricky, 
sobriety to the vinous, and chastity to 
the wanton. Its existence is further con- 
firmed by the attitude of these misap- 
prehended sons when no argument can 
persuade them to be the first messengers, 
to father or mother, of their own trans- 
gression. " Your father must know this 
from me ; but he has a right to know it 
first from you. You say you cannot give 
him pain ; but nothing will help him so 
much in bearing the pain that must be 
his as the knowledge that you yourself 
can tell him all. Before I write to him 
or see him, I will give you time ; and 
I beg you to tell him : you cannot help 
him more now than by going to him, or 
hurt him more than by avoiding him. 
This I know if I know anything : it is 



14 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

not mere theory ; it is based on what I 
have seen of many fathers and of many 
sons." Yet often the student, especially 
the young student, still keeps clear of 
his father as long as he can. 

This want of filial courage at criti« 
cal moments must be accounted for by 
a false reticence in those early years 
in which affectionate freedom between 
father or mother and son must begin. 
Unhappily it is fostered by literature. 
Even Thackeray, whose total influence 
is honest and clean, seems, when he 
writes of college life, to have in mind 
such general propositions as that young 
men always run into debt and seldom 
make all their debts known at home ; 
that all normal young men live more or 
less wantonly ; that only girls (whose in- 
tellects are seldom strong) are pure in 
heart and life, and that their purity is 
a kind of innocence born of blindness 
and of shelter from the world ; that no 
mother knows the morbid unrest which 



AND CHARACTER 15 

IS stirring in her sweet-faced little boy. 
Pendennis, Philip, the Poems — all fur- 
nish marked instances of Thackeray's 
attitude toward the exuberant folly and 
sin of young men ; and his notion of a 
man's standard in things moral is re- 
vealed by his remark that " no writer of 
fiction among us has been permitted to 
depict to his utmost power a man," since 
the author of Tom Jones. 

Thackeray is only too near the truth. 
The earliest important cause of reticence 
between parent and child, the longest 
continued, the fiercest, and the most 
morbidly silent temptation, the tempta- 
tion most likely to scorch and blight a 
whole life and the lives of those who 
come after, the temptation most likely 
to lead through passion to reckless self- 
ishness, and through shame to reckless 
lying, is the manifold temptation in the 
mysterious relation of sex to sex. No 
subject needs, for the health of our sons 
and for the protection of our daughters, 



i6 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

to be brought earlier out of the region 
of alluring and forbidden exploration 
into the light of wholesome truth — out 
of the category of the unspeakable into 
the category of things which, though 
talked of seldom, may be talked of freely 
between father or mother and son. 
Temptation, passion, will exist always ; 
but temptation and passion which must 
be nursed or suppressed in secret are 
far more insidious, far less conquerable. 
Moreover, temptation and passion, when 
confided to a father or a mother by a 
son who is struggling to do right, lose 
half their danger: the strength of those 
nearest and dearest buoys up our own ; 
and the fear of confessing a sin — a false 
fear when once the sin is committed — 
may be wholesome as a safeguard. No 
parent can begin to be in a frank relation 
to his son if he has left that son to pick 
up in the street and in the newspaper all 
his knowledge of the laws to which he 
owes his life ; yet, as things stand, this 



AND CHARACTER 17 

most vital of all subjects is often the one 
subject about which a young man shrinks 
from talking with any but contempora- 
ries as ignorant as himself, a subject kept 
in the dark, except for coarse jokes at 
the theatre or at convivial gatherings of 
boys and men. 

Almost equally important with an un- 
derstanding between parent and son is 
an understanding between every student 
and at least one college officer. There 
must be some one on the spot to whom 
the student may talk freely and fully 
about such perplexities as beset every 
young man in a new life away from 
home. Even a college-bred father is 
college-bred in another generation, and 
cannot know those local and temporal 
characteristics of a college on the mas- 
tery of which depends so large a measure 
of the student's happiness. Besides, a 
father may not be promptly accessible, 
whereas every good college has at hand 
many officers whose best satisfaction lies 



i8 SCHOOL, COLLEGEc 

in giving freely of their time and strength 
to less experienced men that trust them. 
Some confidences, no doubt, a college 
officer cannot accept ; but even in a case 
of grave wrongdoing, if the relation be- 
tween him and the student is on both 
sides clearly understood, a full confes- 
sion, the only honorable course, is usu- 
ally, in the long run, the only prudent 
course also. At Harvard College the 
relation between a Freshman and his 
" adviser " is much what the Freshman 
makes it ; for the adviser feels an older 
man's diffidence about forcing his friend- 
ship on defenceless youth : but it may be 
made of high and permanent value. So 
may the relation between a student and 
any worthy college teacher whom the 
student, because he has seen in him some- 
thing to inspire confidence, has chosen 
for a counsellor. Here, too, a father inti- 
mate with his son may help him to over- 
come shyness, and to make use of that 
disinterested friendship of older men 



AND CHARACTER 19 

which is one of the best opportunities of 
college life and is often thrown away. 

By fostering these friendships and in- 
fluences, by interesting himself in every 
detail of a son's career, a father may do 
much. A mother may often do more, 
by establishing her son in the friendship 
of good women. This is partly a mat- 
ter of social influence, no doubt ; a poor 
and ignorant woman a thousand miles 
away may not see how she can effect it ; 
may shrink from an appeal to the un- 
known wives of unknown professors for 
friendly greetings to her boy : but many 
women whose sons are sent to a college 
town know, or have friends that know, 
or have friends who have friends that 
know, good women there. The friend- 
ship of good women is, as everybody 
knows, the sweetest and most wholesome 
corrective of loneliness and of wander- 
ing desires. A boy of seventeen or 
eighteen, far from home for the first 
time, fresh from the society of mothei 



20 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

and sisters and girl friends, may be ter- 
ribly lonely. Near any college he will 
find a number of foolish girls, easy of 
acquaintance, proud to know a student, 
and not fastidious about conventionali- 
ties ; girls not vicious as yet, but on the 
unseen road to vice ; girls whom he could 
not comfortably introduce to his mother 
and sisters, but who, merely as girls ^ are 
of interest to him in the absence of social 
and intellectual equals. The peril of 
such friendships is as commonplace as 
truth and as undying : reckless giddiness 
on one side, reckless selfishness half dis- 
guised by better names on the other, the 
excitement of things known to be not 
quite proper but not clearly recognized 
as wrong, have led to one kind of misery 
or another, so long as men have been 
men and women women. Yet these 
sorrows, toward which men move at first 
with no semblance of passion, but with 
mere lonely curiosity, may be forestalled 
Counsel of parents, too seldom given in 



AND CHARACTER 21 

such matters, will do much ; access to 
home life, to the friendship of motherly- 
mothers and of modest, sensible daugh- 
ters, will do more. Shy and awkward 
a Freshman may be, and ridiculously 
afraid of speaking with women : yet the 
shyer and the more awkward he is, the 
lonelier he is — the more in need of see- 
ing the inside of a house and of a home ; 
the more likely to remember, as what 
made his first college year supportable, 
some few days in which a good woman 
who used to know his mother has opened 
her doors to him as to a human being 
and a friend. 

After all, the most searching test of a 
parent's relation to his son in college is 
the son's own view of the purpose of his 
college life. As I have said elsewhere, 
" Many parents regard college as far less 
serious in its demands than school or 
business, as a place of delightful irrespon- 
sibility, a sort of four years' breathing- 
space wherein a youth may at once cul- 



22 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

tivate and disport himself before he is 
condemned for life to hard labor." They 
" like to see young people have a good 
time ; " a little evasion, a little law-break- 
ing, and a handful of wild oats mark in 
their minds the youth of spirit. They 
distinguish between outwitting the au- 
thorities, whom they still regard as im- 
personal or hostile, and outwitting other 
less disinterested friends. " Boys will be 
boys " is a cover, not merely for the 
thoughtless exuberance of lively young 
animals, but for selfishness, trickiness, 
cruelty, and even vice. I wonder at the 
rashness with which respectable men talk 
of wild oats as a normal and on the whole 
an attractive attribute of youth ; for the 
wild oats theory of a young man's life, 
when seen without its glamour, may 
mean awful physical peril, disingenuous 
relations with father and mother, dis- 
honor to some girl, as yet perhaps un- 
known, who is going to be his wife. 
Yet parents, whether by precept or by 



AND CHARACTER 23 

example or by mere personal inefFective- 
ness or by dulness and neglect, encour- 
age that very disingenuousness which is 
exercised against themselves. Those 
who have seen the unhappiness that 
such disingenuousness brings can never 
forget it. I have been begged by un- 
dergraduates to keep students out of 
a great Boston gambling-house, long 
since closed. In that gambling-house 
as Freshmen they had become bank- 
rupt ; and for months — almost for years 
— they had shifted and lied to keep 
their bankruptcy unknown at home. 
The crash of discovery had come, as it 
always comes ; the air had cleared ; and 
as Seniors they were unwilling to leave 
college without at least an attempt to 
save other Freshmen from doing and 
from suffering what they had done and 
suffered. I have seen sons before the 
crash, and I have seen parents after it. 

How much that is objectionable in 
college life is the result of injudicious 



24 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

money allowances (whether princely or 
niggardly), I have never determined. 
Some students use large incomes as wisely 
as their elders and more generously; 
some pay the entire college expenses of 
fellow students in need : others, no doubt, 
have more money than is good for them ; 
but it is hard to pick out that part of 
their moral and academic disaster for 
which wealth is responsible. 

I may mention here that two-edged 
argument so often urged by a father 
when his son is to be dismissed from 
college : " If you don't keep him here, 
what shall I do with him? He isn't fit 
for anything else ; he would do nothing 
in a profession or in business." I cannot 
say with some that it is no concern of 
the college what is done with him ; for a 
college, as I conceive it, has some inter- 
est in the future of every boy that has 
darkened its doors : but I can say that a 
youth confessedly fit for nothing else is 
not often good timber for an alumnus. 



AND CHARACTER 25 

A college is not a home for incurables 
or a limbo for tHeHulT and ine fficient. 
Moreover, as a Western father observed, 
" It does not pay to spend two thousand 
dollars on a two-dollar boy." Though 
a firm believer in college training as the 
supreme intellectual privilege of youth, 
I am convinced that the salvation of 
some young men (for the practical pur 
poses of this present world) is in taking 
them out of college and giving them 
long and inevitable hours in some office 
or factory. I do not mean that all success 
in college belongs to the good scholars ; 
for many a youth who stands low in his 
classes gets incalculable benefit from his 
college course. He may miss that im- 
portant part of training which consists 
in his doing the thing for which he is 
booked ; but he does something for which 
— through a natural mistake, if it is a 
mistake — he thinks he is booked : he 
leads an active life, of subordination 
here, of leadership there, of responsibility 



26 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

everywhere ; and he leads it in a com* 
munity where learning and culture 
abound, where ideals are noble, and 
where courage and truth are rated high. 
Such a young man, if he barely scrapes 
through (provided he scrapes through 
honestly), has wasted neither his father's 
money nor his own time. Even the de- 
sultory reader who contracts, at the ex- 
pense of his studies, what has been called 
"the library habit," may become the 
glory of his Alma Mater. It is the weak- 
kneed dawdler who ought to go, the 
youth whose body and mind are wasting 
away in bad hours and bad company, 
and whose sense of truth grows dimmer 
and dimmer in the smoke of his cigar- 
ettes ; yet it is precisely this youth who, 
through mere inertia, is hardest to move, 
who seems glued to the university, whose 
father is helpless before his future, and 
whose relatives contend that, since he is 
no man's enemy but his own, he should 
be allowed to stay in college so long as 



AND CHARACTER 27 

his father will pay his tuition fee, — as 
if a college were a public conveyance 
wherein anybody that pays his fare may 
abide '' unless personally obnoxious," or 
a hotel where anybody that pays enough 
may lie in bed and have all the good 
things sent up to him. No college — 
certainly no college with an elective sys- 
tem, which presupposes a youth's inter- 
est in his own intellectual welfare — can 
afford to keep such as he. Nor can he 
afford to be kept. One of the first aims 
of college life is increase of power : be 
he scholar or athlete, the sound under- 
graduate learns to meet difficulties; 
" stumbling-blocks," in the words of an 
admirable preacher, " become stepping- 
stones." It is a short-sighted kindness 
that keeps in college (with its priceless 
opportunities for growth and its corre- 
sponding opportunities for degeneration) 
a youth who lies down in front of his 
stumbling-blocks in the vague hope that 
by and by the authorities will have them 
carted away. 



28 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

The only substitute for the power that 
surmounts obstacles is the enthusiasm 
before which obstacles disappear ; and 
sometimes a student who has never got 
hold of his work finds on a sudden that 
it has got hold of him. Here, I admit, 
is the loafer's argument (or, rather, the 
loafer's father's argument) for the loafer's 
continuance at a seat of learning. In any 
loafer may lurk the latent enthusiast: 
no man's offering is so hopelessly non- 
combustible that it never can be touched 
by the fire from heaven ; and few places 
are more exposed to the sparks than our 
best colleges. Some new study (chosen, 
it may be, as a " snap "), some magnetic 
teacher, some classmate's sister, may, in 
the twinkling of an eye, create and es- 
tablish an object in a hitherto aimless 
life, and an enthusiasm which makes light 
of work, — just as the call to arms has 
transmuted many an idler into a man. 
Some idlers whose regeneration is less 
sudden are idlers at college chiefly be* 



AND CHARACTER 29 

cause they have yet to adjust themselves 
to an elective system, have yet to find 
their niche in the intellectual life. Talk- 
ing with a famous professor some years 
ago about his wish to lower the re- 
quirements for admission to college, I 
expressed the fear that, with lowered 
requirements, would come a throng of 
idlers. " That," said he, with a para- 
doxical wisdom for which I am not yet 
ripe, but which I have at last begun to 
understand, ''That is precisely what I 
should like to see. I should like to see 
an increase in the number of these idle 
persons ; for here are set before them 
higher ideals than are set before them 
elsewhere." " People talk of evil in col- 
lege," says a graduate with business ex- 
perience in New York. " I tell you, 
college is a place of white purity when 
compared with the New York business 
world." In the withdrawal of the veriest 
idler from the hope of the vision lies a 
chance of injury ; and this chance, small 



30 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

as it is, may fill the horizon of father or 
mother. " Dismissal from college means 
certain ruin." Hence these tears of strong 
men, these " fits of the asterisks " in un- 
disciplined women. Hence those varia- 
tions in the father who first proclaims 
that his son must stand near the head of 
his class or go; next, when that son has 
fallen short of the least that the college 
demands, drags out every argument good 
or bad for keeping him till the end, — 
and at last almost leaps for joy if he is 
warranted auction-sound 6n Commence- 
ment Day. Recognition of the possible 
disaster in withdrawal may be blended, 
in a parent's mind, with desire to avoid 
personal mortification ; but it is a strong 
motive for all that, and a worthy one. 
It makes an administrative officer cau- 
tious in action, and enables him to listen 
with sympathy to pleading for which a 
careless outsider might find no excuse. 

Yet the chance is too small, and the 
risk is too great. The shock of adversity 
when the doors of the college close, the 



AND CHARACTER 31 

immediate need of hard, low-paid work 
in a cold world where there is no success 
. without industry, may be the one saving 
thing after the failure of the academic 
invitation to duty with no palpable rela- 
tion of industry to success. Compulsory 
labor with a definite object may at length 
bring voluntary labor and that enjoyment 
of work without which nobody who is 
so fortunate as to work for his living 
through most of his waking hours can be 
efficient or happy ; and exclusion from 
::ollege is sometimes the awakening from 
dull and selfish immaturity into respon- 
sible manhood. No one is entitled to a 
college education who does not earn the 
right from day to day by strenuous or 
by enthusiastic life ; college is for the 
ablest and the best : yet, as some fathers 
send their least efficient sons into the 
ministry, as some men who have failed 
in divers walks of life seek a refuge as 
teachers of literature, so, and with results 
almost as deplorable, some people send 
their boys to college because nobody 



32 SCHOOL, COLLEGE, 

can see in those boys a single sign of 
usefulness. 

Wise fathers and mothers, when thej 
visit a college officer, are commonly con- 
cerned with their sons' courses of study ; 
their mission is rarely sorrowful. The 
parents of troublesome students are not, 
as a rule, wise. Yet some fathers and 
mothers whose sons have gone wrong 
stand out clearly in my mind as almost 
everything that a parent should be, — 
asking no favors, seeing clearly and 
promptly the distinction between the 
honorable and the dishonorable, and the 
distinction between the honorable and 
the half honorable, holding the standard 
high for their sons and for themselves in 
every relation of life : women struggling 
in silent loyalty to free their children from 
the iniquity of the fathers, and men as 
tender as women and as true as truth 
itself. What they are to their sons we 
can only guess ; to an administrative 
officer, they are "as the shadow of a 
great rock in a weary land/' 



FROM 
ROUTINE AND IDEALS 



THE MISTAKES OF COLLEGE 
LIFE 

A TALK TO BOYS ON THE POINT OF 
ENTERING COLLEGE 

In a certain sense, college is the place 
for mistakes. In college a young man 
tests his strength, and, while testing it, 
is protected from the results of failure far 
more effectively than he will ever be pro- 
tected afterward. The youth who is de- 
termined to succeed in public speaking 
may stand up again and again in a col- 
lege debating club, may fail again and 
again, and through his failure may rise 
to success ; whereas if he should put off 
his efforts until some political campaign 
had called him to the stump, no audience 
would listen to him, or even let him go 



i84 THE MISTAKES OF 

on. '* The mistakes that make us men," 
says Dr. Lyman Abbott, ^' are better than 
the accuracies that keep us children." 
Yet even in college there are mistakes 
by which the career of a happy, well- 
meaning youth is suddenly darkened ; 
and though he may learn out of the very 
bitterness of his experience, he is never 
quite the same again. 

All boys with a fair chance in the world 
have at their best a common motive, — 
to be of some use, to lead active, efficient 
lives, to do something worth doing, and 
to do it well, to become men on whom 
people instinctively and not in vain rely. 
Men and women may be divided roughly 
into two classes, — those who are *'there," 
and those who are " not there." The 
*' not there" people may be clever, 
may be what is called ^* good company," 
may have, even after you know them 
pretty well, a good deal of personal 
charm ; but once know them through 
and through, and you have no use for 



COLLEGE LIFE 185 

them. The *' there '^ people may be un- 
poHshed, unmagnetic, without social 
charm ; but once understand that they 
are " there/* and you get help and com- 
fort from the mere knowledge that there 
are such people in the world. Every boy 
in his heart of hearts admires a man who 
is " there/* and wishes to be like him ; 
but not every boy (and here is the sad 
part of it) understands that to be *^ there** 
is the result of a long process, the result 
of training day by day and year by year, 
precisely as to be a sure man (I do not 
say a brilliant man) in the pitcher* s box 
or 'behind the bat is the result of long 
training. A single decision or indecision, 
an act of a moment or a moment* s fail- 
ure to act, may turn a whole life awry ; 
but the weakness of that moment is only 
the expression of a weakness which for 
months or for years has been undermin- 
ing the character, or at best the result of 
a failure to train body, mind, and heart 
for the emergencies of life. 



i86 THE MISTAKES OF 

In this training we can learn, if we 
will, from other people^ s experience ; and 
although boys are loath to accept any- 
body's experience but their own, and are 
not always wise enough to accept that, 
it is yet worth while to show them some 
dangers which other boys have met or 
have failed to meet, that they may not 
be taken unawares. A great man, almost 
too far above the temptations of the aver- 
age boy to understand them, has con- 
demned talking to boys and young men 
about temptation ; he would fill their 
minds with good things : but there are 
no boys whose minds are so full of good 
things that a temptation cannot get in 
edgewise. An absorbing interest in a 
good something or a good somebody 
holds back and may finally banish the 
worst temptations ; it is quite as impor- 
tant to interest boys in good things as 
to take away their interest in bad ones : 
but when all is said, the lightest hearted 
boy who comes to manhood must come 



COLLEGE LIFE 187 

to it ** through sorrows and through 
scars/' 

To many boys the beginning of col- 
lege life is the first step into the world. 
Its dangers are much like those of other 
first steps into the world, yet with this 
difference : the college boy has the ad- 
vantage of living where ideals are noble, 
and the disadvantage (if he is weak or 
immature) of living where he need not 
get heartily tired day after day in keep- 
ing long, inevitable hours of work. This 
disadvantage is indeed a privilege, but a 
privilege which like all privileges is bad 
unless accorded to a responsible being. 
To discipline one's self, to hold one's self 
responsible, is ever so much better than 
to be disciplined, to be held responsible 
by somebody else ; but it is a task for a 
man. Naturally enough, then, the mis- 
takes and the sins of college life are 
commonly rooted in boyish irresponsi- 
bility. 

The average youth takes kindly to the 



i88 THE MISTAKES OF 

notion that in the first year or two at 
college he need not be bound by the or- 
dinary restraints of law-abiding men and 
women. ^' Boys will be boys/^ even to 
'the extent of sowing wild oats. Time 
enough to settle down by and by ; mean- 
while the world is ours. A year or so 
of lawlessness will be great fun, and will 
give us large experience ; and even if 
we shock some good people, we are but 
doing the traditional thing. A youth 
who feels thus takes prompt offence if 
treated, as he says, '' like a kid ; ^^ yet he 
may do things so low that any honest 
child would despise them. Nor is this 
true of one sex only. I have heard a mar- 
ried woman recount with satisfaction her 
two nights^ work in stealing a sign when 
she was at college ; and her father, a col- 
lege man, listened with sympathetic joyo 
I have known a youth who held a large 
scholarship in money to steal, or — as he 
preferred to say — *' pinch, '^ an instru- 
ment worth several dollars from the lab- 



COLLEGE LIFE 189 

oratory where he was trusted as he would 
have been trusted in a gentleman's par- 
lor. I have even heard of students who 
bought signs, and hung them up in their 
rooms to get the reputation of stealing 
them. Surely there is nothing in college 
life to make crime a joke. A street 
** mucker'' sneaks into a student's room 
and steals half a dozen neckties (for 
which the student has not paid), and 
nothing is too hard for him ; a student 
steals a poor laundry man's sign for fun : 
may a gentleman do without censure 
what sends a ''mucker" to jail? If the 
gentleman is locked up in the evening 
to be taken before the judge in the morn- 
ing, his friends are eager to get him out. 
Yet in one night of ascetic meditation 
he may learn more than in his whole 
previous life of his relation to the rights 
of his fellow men. One of the first les- 
sons in college life is an axiom : Crime 
is crime, and a thief is a thief, even at an 
institution of learning. The college thief 



rgo THE MISTAKES OF 

has, it is true, a different motive from his 
less favored brother ; but is the motive 
better ? Is there not at the root of it a 
misunderstanding of one man^s relation 
to another, so selfish that, in those who 
ought to be the flower of American 
youth, it would be hardly conceivable if 
we did not see it with our own eyes? 
People sometimes wonder at the de- 
sire of towns to tax colleges, instead 
of helping them. A small number of 
students who steal signs, and refuse to 
pay bills unless the tradesman's man- 
ner pleases them, may well account for 
it all. 

As there is nothing in college life to 
justify a thief, so there is nothing in it 
to justify a liar. College boys in their 
relation to one another are quite as truth- 
ful as other people ; but some of them 
regard their dealings with college author- 
ities as some men regard horse-trades. 
We know them capable of distinguish- 
ing truth from falsehood, since their 



COLLEGE LIFE 191 

standard of integrity for their teachers 
is sensitively high. Their standard for 
themselves is part of that conceit, of 
that blind incapacity for the Golden 
Rule, which is often characteristic of 
early manhood. To this blindness most 
books about school and college life con- 
tribute. Even the healthier of these 
books stir the reader^ s sympathy in be- 
half of the gentlemanly, happy-go-lucky 
youth who pulls wool over the eyes of 
his teachers, and deepen the impression 
that college boys live in a fairyland of 
charming foolery, and are no more mor- 
ally responsible than the gods of Olym- 
pus. Plainly such a theory of college 
life, even if no one holds to it long, 
nurses a selfishness and an insincerity 
which may outlast the theory that has 
nourished them. The man who has his 
themes written for him, or who cribs at 
examinations, or who excuses himself 
from college lectures because of ''sick- 
ness ^^ in order to rest after or before a 



192 THE MISTAKES OF 

dance, may be clever and funny to read 
about ; but his cleverness and '* funni- 
ness'^ are not many degrees removed 
from those of the forger and the im- 
postor, who may also be amusing in 
fiction. 

Another bad thing in the substitution 
of excuses, even fairly honest excuses, 
for work is the weakening effect of it on 
everyday life. The work of the world is 
in large measure done by people whose 
heads and throats and stomachs do not 
feel just right, but who go about their 
daily duties, and in doing them forget 
their heads and throats and stomachs. 
He who is to be ^' there'' as a man can- 
not afford to cosset himself as a boy. A 
well-known railroad man has remarked 
that he knows in his business two kinds 
of men : one, with a given piece of work 
to do before a given time, comes back at 
the appointed hour and says, '' That job 
is done. I found unexpected difficulties, 
but it is done;'' the other comes back 



COLLEGE LIFE 193 

with ** several excellent reasons^' why 
the job is not done. " I have/' says the 
railroad man, ** no use for the second of 
these men/' Nor has any business man 
use for him. The world is pretty cold 
toward chronic invalids and excuse- 
mongers. *^ If you are too sick to be 
here regularly/' it says, '*I am sorry for 
you, but I shall have to employ a health- 
ier man." You will find, by the way, 
that it is easier to attend all your re- 
citations than to attend half or three- 
quarters of them. Once open the ques- 
tion of not going, and you see ** several 
excellent reasons " for staying at home. 
Routine, as all mature men know, stead- 
ies nerves, and, when used intelligently, 
adds contentment to life. 

I have spoken of lying to college offi- 
cers, and of excuses which, if I may use 
an undergraduate expression, '* may be 
right, but are not stylish right," I come 
next to the question of responsibility to 
father and mother in matters of truth and 



194 THE MISTAKES OF 

falsehood. One of the evils from vice of 
all sorts at college is the lying that re- 
sults from it. Shame and fear, half dis- 
guised as a desire not to worry parents, 
cut off many a father and mother from 
knowing what they have a right to 
know, and what they, if confided in, 
might remedy. I have seldom seen a 
student in serious trouble who did not 
say — honestly enough, I presume — that 
he cared less for his own mortification 
than for his father's and mother's. As 
a rule, one of his parents is threatened 
with nervous prostration, or oppressed 
with business cares, or has a weak heart 
which, as the son argues, makes the 
receipt of bad news dangerous. Filial 
affection, which has been so dormant as 
to let the student do those things which 
would distress his parents most, awakes 
instantly at the thought that the parents 
must learn what he has done. The two 
severest rebukes of a certain gentle mo- 
ther were : '' You ought to have meant 



COLLEGE LIFE 195 

not to/* and '' You ought to have been 
sorry beforehand/' 

Many a student, knowing that the 
college must communicate with his fa- 
ther, will not nerve himself to the duty 
and the filial kindness of telling his fa- 
ther first. I remember a boy who was to 
be suspended for drunkenness, and who 
was urged to break the news to his fa- 
ther before the official letter went. 

'' You don't know my father,'' he said. 
'' My father is a very severe man, and I 
can't tell him." 

'' The only thing you can do for him," 
was the answer, '' is to let him feel that 
you are able and willing to tell him first, 
— that you give him your confidence." 

*' Oh, you don't know him," said the 
boy again. 

''Is there any 'out' about your father?" 

" No " (indignantly) ! "You would 
respect him and admire him ; but he 
is a very severe man." 

" Then he has a right to hear and 



196 THE MISTAKES OF 

to hear first from you. You cannot 
help him more than by telHng him, or 
hurt him more than by hiding the truth 
from him/' 

A day or two later the boy came back 
to the college office. '' My father is a 
brick r' he said. In his confession he had 
learned for the first time how much his 
father cared for him. 

A young man, intensely curious about 
the wickedness of life, is easily persuaded 
that the first business of a college student 
is *'to know life,'' — that is, to know the 
worst things in it ; and, in the pursuit of 
wisdom, he sets out in the evening, with 
others, merely to see the vice of a great 
city. He calls at a house where he meets 
bad men and bad women, and eats and 
drinks with them. What he eats and 
drinks he does not know; but in the 
morning he is still there, with a life stain 
upon him, and needing more than ever 
before to confide in father or mother or 
in some good physician. Yet the people 



COLLEGE LIFE 197 

who can help him most, the people also 
in whom he must confide or be false to 
them, are the very people he avoids. 

Again, it is hard to prove by cold logic 
that gambling is wrong. A young man 
says to himself, ** If I wish to spend a dol- 
lar in this form of amusement, why should 
I not ? I know perfectly well what I am 
about I am playing with money not play- 
ing for it. In some countries — in Eng- 
land, for example — clergymen, and good 
people generally, play whist with shilling 
stakes, and would not think of playing it 
without.'^ So of vice he says, *' No man 
knows human nature until he has seen 
the dark side. I shall be a broader man 
if I know these things ; and some phy- 
sicians recommend the practice of them 
in moderation.'^ When we say, ^* Lead 
us not into temptation, '' we forget that 
one of the worst temptations in the world 
is the temptation to be led into tempta- 
tion, — the temptation to gratify vulgar 
curiosity, and to see on what thin ice we 



198 THE MISTAKES OF 

can walk. No man is safe ; no man can 
tell what he shall do, or what others will 
do to him, if he once enters a gambling 
house or a brothel. The history of every 
city, and the history of every college, will 
prove what I say. There is no wisdom 
in looking at such places, — nothing but 
greenness and folly. The difficulty with 
gambling is, as some one has said, that 
^^ it eats the heart out of a man,^^ — that 
imperceptibly the playing with slips into 
the playing for^ until without gambling 
life seems tame : and the difficulty with 
vice is that it involves physical danger 
of the most revolting kind ; that it kills 
self-respect ; that it brings with it either 
shamelessness or a miserable dishonesty 
for decency^ s sake ; and that it is a breach 
of trust to those who are, or who are 
to be, the nearest and the dearest, — a 
breach of trust to father and mother, and 
to the wife and children, who may seem 
remote and unreal, but who to most 
young men are close at hand. By the 



COLLEGE LIFE 199 

time a boy goes to college, he may well 
feel responsibility to the girl whom some 
day he will respect and love, and who, 
he hopes, will respect and love him. A 
boy^s or man^s sense of fair play should 
show him that it is effrontery in a man 
who has been guilty of vice with women 
to ask for a pure girFs love. The time is 
only too likely to come when a young 
fellow who has yielded to the tremendous 
sudden temptation that is thrown at him 
in college and in the world, will face the 
bitter question, '' Can I tell the truth 
about myself to the girl I love ? If I tell 
it, I may justly lose her ; if I do not tell 
it, my whole life may be a frightened lie.'' 

" Who is the Happy Husband ? He 
Who, scanning his unwedded life, 
Thanks Heaven, with a conscience free, 
'T was faithful to his future wife." 

Not merely the curiosity which listens 
to false arguments about life and wisdom, 
but the awful loneliness of a boy far from 
home, may lead to vice and misery. The 



200 THE MISTAKES OF 

boy who is used to girls at home, and 
who knows in his new surroundings no 
such girls as he knew at home, no such 
girls as his sisters' friends, is only too 
likely to scrape an easy acquaintance 
with some of those inferior girls by whom 
every student is seen in a kind of glamour, 
and to whom acquaintance with students 
is the chief excitement of life. With little 
education, much giddy vanity, and no 
refinement, these girls may yet possess a 
sort of cheap attractiveness. They are, 
besides, easy to get acquainted with, easy 
to be familiar with, and interesting sim- 
ply because they are girls — for the time 
being, the only accessible girls. I need 
not dwell on the embarrassment, the sor- 
row, and even the crime, in which such 
friendships may end; but I may empha- 
size the responsibility of every man, 
young or old, towards every woman. 
*' Every free and generous spirit, '' said 
Milton, ''ought to be born a knight.'' 
It is the part of a man to protect these 



COLLEGE LIFE 201 

girls against themselves. If they know 
no better than to hint to a student that 
they should like to see his room some 
evening, he knows better than to take 
the hint, — better than to suffer them 
through him to do what, though it may 
not stain their character, may yet de- 
stroy their good name. No girls stand 
more in need of chivalry than these vain 
girls, not yet bad, who flutter about the 
precincts of a college. 

Students know what responsibility 
means ; but their views of it are dis- 
torted. They demand it of their elders ; 
in certain parts of athletics they demand 
it of themselves. Which is the worse 
breach of faith, to sit up a quarter of 
an hour later than your athletic trainer 
allows, or to betray the trust that father 
and mother have put in you, to gamble 
away or to spend on low women the 
money sent you for your term-bill, and 
to cover all with a lie ? 

It may be from a dim notion of these 



202 THE MISTAKES OF 

eccentricities in undergraduate judgment 
that many boys cultivate irresponsibility 
with a view to social success. Social am- 
bition is the strongest power in many a 
students college life, a power compared 
with which all the rules and all the threats 
of the Faculty, who blindly ignore it, are 
impotent, a power that robs boys of their 
independence, leading them to do things 
foolish or worse and thereby to defeat 
their own end. For in the long run, — in 
the later years of the college course, — 
the '' not there ^^ and the '' there '' can be 
clearly distinguished. A student may be 
poor, he may not play poker, he may not 
drink, he may be free from all vice, he 
may not even smoke ; and yet, if his 
virtue is not showy, he will be popular 
— provided he '' does something for his 
class.'^ ''He is a bully fellow,'' the students 
say. '' He is in training all the time.'' 

I say little of responsibility to younger 
students. An older student who misleads 
a younger gets just about the name he 



COLLEGE LIFE 203 

deserves. Even the Sophomore who se- 
riously hazes a Freshman is now in the 
better colleges recognized as a coward. 
Cowardice once recognized, cannot long 
prevail ; yet there was a time when it 
took a deal of courage for a few young 
men in one of our great colleges to stop 
an outbreak of hazing. It took a deal 
of courage ; but they did it. After all, 
a student admires nothing so much as 
" sand.^' What he needs is to see that 
*^ sand ^^ belongs not merely in war and 
athletics, but in everyday life, and that 
in everyday life ''sand'^ may be accu- 
mulated. A Harvard student, it is said, 
was nearly dressed one morning and 
was choosing a necktie, when his door, 
which with the carelessness of youth he 
had left unlocked, suddenly opened. A 
woman entered, closed the door behind 
her, put her back to it, and said, '* I want 
fifty dollars. If you don't give it to me, 
I shall scream.' ' The young man, still 
examining his neckties, quietly replied, 



204 THE MISTAKES OF 

** You ^d better holler ; '^ and the woman 
went out. Had he given her money, had 
he even paid serious attention to her 
threat, he might have been in her power 
for life ; but his coolness saved him. An- 
other undergraduate, who before coming 
to college had worked as an engineer, 
and who was a few years older than 
most of his class, went one evening to 
an officer of the college who knew some- 
thing of him, and said, '' I hardly know 
just how I ought to speak to you ; but 
in my building there is a Freshman who 
is going to pieces, and a Senior who is 
largely responsible for it.'' He then told 
what he had seen, and gave the names 
of both men. '' If I look this up,'' said 
the college officer, *'are you willing to 
appear in it? Are you willing to have 
your name known?" ''I'd rather not 
be ' queered,' " he answered ; '' but if it 
is necessary to be * queered,' I will be." 
All this happened in a college which 
employs no spies and discourages tale- 



COLLEGE LIFE 205 

bearing. For anything the student knew, 
the officer himself might think him a 
malicious informer. The **sand^' in the 
hero of the first of these little stories any 
boy would see. To see the '' sand ^^ in 
the hero of the second takes some ex- 
perience ; but '* sand/' and '' sand '^ of 
the finest quality, was there. This man's 
notion of the responsibility of older stu- 
dents to younger ones had in it some- 
thing positive. *' You have no idea," 
said a senator to Father Taylor, the 
sailor preacher, who had rebuked him 
for his vote, ** You have no idea what the 
outside pressure was." '^ Outside pres- 
sure, Mr. Senator ! Outside pressure ! 
Where were your inside braces?" To 
run the risk of being thought a common 
informer when you are not, and to run 
it because you cannot let a man go under 
without trying to pull him out, requires 
such inside braces as few undergraduates 
possess. 

Let me say, however, that there is no 



2o6 THE MISTAKES OF 

better hope for Harvard College than in 
the readiness of the strong to help the 
weak. A youth is summoned to the col- 
lege office, behindhand in his work, and 
bad in his way of living. The Faculty 
has done its best for him, and to no pur- 
pose. A student of acknowledged stand- 
ing in athletics and in personal charac- 
ter appears at the office, and says, '' I 
should like to see whether I can make 
that man work and keep him straight/' 
This, or something like this, occurs so 
often that it is an important part of the 
college life. Moreover, when the strong 
man comes, he does not come with the 
foolish notion that he shall help the weak 
man in the eyes of the college office by 
pretending that he is not weak. He takes 
the case as it stands, knowing that his 
own purpose and that of the college of- 
fice are one and the same, — to keep the 
student, if he can be made into a man, 
and otherwise in all kindness to send 
him home. 



COLLEGE LIFE 207 

One more responsibility needs men- 
tioning here, — responsibility to our 
work. In college, it is said, a man of 
fair capacity may do well one thing 
beside his college work, and one thing 
only. Those of us who are so fortunate 
as to earn our own living must spend 
most of our waking hours in work. It 
follows that we must learn to enjoy work 
or be unhappy. Now we learn to enjoy 
work by working ; to get interested in 
any task by doing it with all our strength. 
This is the first lesson of scholarship : 
without it we cannot be scholars ; and 
only by courtesy can we be called stu- 
dents. This is the first lesson of happy 
activity in life. In athletics, in music, 
in study, in business, we "train'* our- 
selves toward the free exercise of our 
best powers, toward the joy that comes of 
mastery. A college oarsman once de- 
clared that after a season on the slides he 
felt able to undertake anything. The in- 
tellectual interests of a modern university 



208 THE MISTAKES OF 

are bewildering and intense. Among 
them every intelligent youth can find 
something worthy of his best labors, 
something in which his best labors will 
yield enjoyment beyond price. Right- 
minded students see the noble oppor- 
tunity in a college life ; and there is no 
sadder sight than the blindness of those 
who do not see it until it is lost for- 
ever. 

While speaking of the intellectual 
side of college life, I may warn students 
against becoming specialists too early. 
Every study has some connection with 
every other and gets some light from 
it ; but a specialty, seriously undertaken, 
compels a close stud}^ of itself, and may 
leave little time for other study. An un- 
enlightened specialist is a narrow being ; 
and he who becomes an exclusive spe- 
cialist before he has been in college two 
years is usually unenlightened. Even 
after the choice of a specialty, a stu- 
dent, like a professional man, may wisely 



COLLEGE LIFE 209 

reserve one corner of his mind for some- 
thing totally different from his specialty, 
and may find in that little corner a relief 
which makes him a better specialist It 
is good for a man buried in a chemical 
laboratory to take a course in English 
poetry; it is good for a man steeped 
in literature to have a mild infusion of 
chemistry. 

The lazy student (if I may return to 
him now) finds the thread of his study 
broken by his frequent absences from 
the lecture room, and finds the lecture 
hour a long, dull period of hard seats and 
wandering thoughts. Note-taking would 
shorten the hour, soften the seats, sim- 
plify the subject, and make the whole 
situation vastly more interesting. No 
matter if some clever students are willing 
to sell him notes, and he has no scruples 
about buying them ; the mere process 
of note-taking, apart from the education 
and training in it, gives him something 
to do in the lecture room, makes it im- 



210 THE MISTAKES OF 

possible for him not to know something 
of the subject, and shortens his period 
of cramming for examination. I beHeve, 
further, that a students happiness is in- 
creased by a time-table of regular hours 
for work in each study. The prepara- 
tion of theses, and the necessity of using 
library books when other people are not 
using them, make it hard now and then 
to follow a time-table strictly ; but in gen- 
eral such a table is a wonderful saver of 
time. If a student leaves one lecture 
room at ten and goes to another at twelve 
and has no idea what he wishes to do 
between ten and twelve, he is likely to 
do nothing. Even if he has determined 
to study, he loses time in getting under 
way — in deciding what to study. Work 
with a time-table tends to promptness in 
transition ; and when the time-table for 
the day is carried out, the free hours are 
truly free, a time of clear and well-earned 
recreation. At school the morning rou- 
tine is prescribed by the teacher. At col- 



COLLEGE LIFE 2U 

lege, where it should be prescribed by 
the student, it frequently breaks down. 
A man's freedom, as viewed with a boy's 
eyes, is Hberty to waste time : it is the 
luxury of spending the best morning 
hours in a billiard room, or loafing in a 
classmate's '' study ; " the joy of hearing 
the bell ring and ring for yoUy while you 
sit high above the slaves of toil and pufi 
the smoke of cigarettes with the superb 
indifference of a small cloud-compelling 
Zeus. The peculiar evil in cigarettes 
I leave for scientific men to explain ; I 
know merely that among college stu- 
dents the excessive cigarette smokers are 
recognized even by other smokers as re- 
presenting the feeblest form of intellec- 
tual and moral life. At their worst they 
have no backbone ; they cannot tell (and 
possibly cannot see) the truth ; and they 
loaf. Senator Hoar, in an address to 
Harvard students, remarked that in his 
judgment the men who succeed best in 
life are the men who have made the best 



212 THE MISTAKES OF 

use of the odd moments at college; and 
that, contrary to the general opinion, it is 
worse to loaf in college than to loaf in a 
professional school. The young lawyer, 
he observed, who has neglected the law 
may make up his deficiencies in the 
early years of his practice ; ''he will 
have plenty of time then : '^ but there is 
no recovery of the years thrown away at 
college. 

Once more, if we could only teach by 
the experience of others, we should save 
untold misery. I met not long since a 
young business man who had been for 
four years on and off probation in Har- 
vard College and had not yet received his 
degree. In college he had seemed dull. 
He probably thought he worked, because 
his life was broken into, more or less, by 
college exercises, which he attended with 
some regularity. Now he is really work- 
ing, with no time to make up college defi- 
ciencies, ready to admit that in college 
he hardly knew the meaning of work^ 



COLLEGE LIFE 213 

and to say simply and spontaneously, ''I 
made a fool of myself in college.*' An- 
other student, who did nothing in his 
studies, who spent four or five thousand 
dollars a year, and who constantly hired 
tutors to do his thinking, was finally 
expelled because he got a substitute to 
write an examination for him. Home 
trouble followed college trouble ; he was 
thrown on himself and into the cold 
world ; and he became a man. From 
scrubbing street cars, he was promoted 
to running them ; from running them to 
holding a place of trust with men to do 
his orders. '' Every day,'* he said, '' I 
feel the need of what I threw away at 
college. Do you think if I came back I 
should need any more tutors ? I 'd go 
through quicker than anything, with no- 
body to help me. What sent me away 
was the one dishonest thing in my life.*' 
The dishonest thing came about through 
loafing. 

Even socially, as I have intimated, the 



214 THE MISTAKES OF 

loafer seldom or never wins the highest 
college success. Graduating classes be- 
stow their honors on men who have 
'* done something/' — athletics, college 
journalism, debating, if you will, not 
necessarily hard study in the college 
course, but hard and devoted work in 
something, and work with an unselfish 
desire to help the college and the class. 
At Harvard College in the class of 1899 
all three marshals graduated with dis- 
tinction in their studies. By the begin- 
ning of the Senior year the class knows 
the men to be relied on, the men who 
are ^' there,'' and knows that they are 
men of active life. 

I have spoken earlier of a student's 
responsibility to some unknown girl who 
is to be his wife. What is his respon- 
sibility to a known girl with whom 
in college days he falls in love ? Just 
as college Faculties are blind to the ef- 
fect of social ambition in students, they 
are blind to the effect of sweethearts. I 



COLLEGE LIFE 215 

do not quite know what they could do 
if their eyes were opened ; for college 
rules, happily, must be independent 
of sweethearts. I mean merely that 
scores of cases in which students break 
rules, '' cut ^' lectures, disappear for a 
day or two without permission, and 
do other things that look rebellious, 
are readily accounted for by the disqui- 
eting influence of girls. What students 
do (or don't) when they are in love is 
a pretty good test of their character. 
One drops his work altogether, and de- 
votes what time he cannot spend with 
the girl to meditating upon her. He can 
think of nothing else ; and accordingly 
for her sake he becomes useless. Another 
sets his teeth, and works hard. '' She is," 
he says naturally enough, *' infinitely 
above me. How She ever can care for 
me, I do not know ; whether She ever 
will, I do not know ; but I will be what 
I can and do what I can. I will do what- 
ever I do as if I were doing it for Her. 



2i6 THE MISTAKES OF 

I am doing it for Her. If I succeed, it 
will be through Her ; if my success pleases 
Her, I shall be repaid.'^ 

No girl worth having will think better 
of a man for shirking his plain duty in 
order to hang about her. No girl likes 
a "quitter;'' and most girls agree with 
the heroine of Mr. Kipling's beautiful 
story, ''William the Conqueror," when 
she says, *' I like men who do things." 
The story shows with profound and ex- 
quisite truth how two persons of strong 
character may grow into each other's 
love and into an understanding of it by 
doing their separate duties. To go on, 
girl or no girl, without excuses small or 
great ; to do the appointed task and to 
do it cheerfully amid all distractions, all 
sorrows, all heartaches ; to make routine 
(not blind but enlightened routine) your 
friend — thus it is that by and by when 
you meet the hard blows of the world 
you can 

*' Go labor on ; spend and be spent." 



COLLEGE LIFE 217 

Thus it is that you find the strength 
which is born of trained capacity for in- 
terest in daily duty. 

On the banks of the Connecticut is a 
school without a loafer in it. The schol- 
ars are needy for the most part, and so 
grimly in earnest that only a printed 
regulation restrains them from getting 
up '* before 5 A. M.'^ without permission. 
I am far from recommending study be- 
fore breakfast, or loss of the night's sleep ; 
but I admire the whole-hearted energy 
with which these boys and grown men 
seize the opportunity of their lives. I 
admire the same energy in athletics, if a 
student will only remember that his ath- 
letics are for his college, not his college 
for his athletics. 

One more caution for college life and 
for after life. Do not let your ideals get 
shopworn. Keep the glory of your youth. 
A man with no visions, be he young or 
old, is a poor thing. There is no place 
like a college for visions and ideals ; and 



2i8 THE MISTAKES OF 

it is through our visions, through our 
ideals, that we keep high our standard 
of character and Hfe. No man's charac- 
ter is fixed ; and no responsible man is 
overconfident of his own. It is the part 
of every boy when he arrives at man- 
hood to recognize as one of his greatest 
dangers the fading of the vision, and to 
set himself against this danger with all 
his might. It is only the man with ideals 
who is founded on a rock, and resists the 
rains and the floods. 

A vigorous young fellow, fresh from 
college, went into a business house at 
four dollars a week, and rapidly rose 
to a well-paid and responsible position. 
One day he received from a member of 
the firm an order to do something that 
he thought dishonorable. He showed 
the order to the member of the firm 
whom he knew best, and asked him 
what he thought of it. 

'' Come and dine with me,'' said his 
patron, ''and we will talk it over." 



COLLEGE LIFE 219 

" Excuse me/' said the young man. 
**Any other day I should be glad to 
dine with you ; but this matter is busi- 
ness. '^ 

" Look ! '' said the other. " Business 
is war ; and if you do not do these things 
in business, you can't live.'' 

"I don't believe it," said the young 
man. *' If I did, I should n't be here. I 
leave your employ Saturday night ; " — 
and, to the amazement of the firm, he 
left it forever. 

" And virtue's whole sum is but know and dare," 

said a great poet in one of his great- 
est moments. It takes a man with ideals 
to begin all over again, abandoning the 
kind of work in which he has won con- 
spicuous success, and abandoning it be- 
cause he finds that its methods, though 
accepted by business men generally, are 
for him dishonorable. 

In and out of college the man with 
ideals helps, so far as in him lies, his 



220 THE MISTAKES OF 

college and his country. It is hard for a 
boy to understand that in life, whatever 
he does, he helps to make or mar the name 
of his college. I have said '* in life '' — I 
may say also " in death.'' Not long since, 
I saw a Harvard Senior on what proved 
to be his death-bed. The people at the 
hospital declared that they had never 
seen such pain borne with such fortitude, 
— '' and,'' said the Medical Visitor of the 
University, '' he was through it all such 
a gentleman." A day or two before his 
death an attendant asked him whether 
he felt some local pain. '' I did not," said 
he, ** until you gave me that medicine." 
Then instantly he added, miserably weak 
and suffering as he was, '' I beg your 
pardon. You know and I don't. It may 
be the medicine had nothing to do with 
my pain." I believe no man or woman 
in the ward saw that boy die without 
seeing also a new meaning and a new 
beauty in the college whose name he 
bore. As has often been said, the youth 



COLLEGE LIFE 221 

who loves his Alma Mater will always 
ask, not " What can she do for me ?'' but 
" What can I do for her ? '' 

Responsibility is — first, last, and al- 
ways — the burden of my song, a stu- 
dent's responsibility to home, to fellow 
students, to school, to college, and (let 
me add once more) to the girl whom he 
will ask some day to be his wife. '' Moral 
taste,'' as Miss Austen calls it, is no- 
thing without moral force. ''If," said a 
college President to a Freshman class, 
" you so live that in a few years you will 
be a fit companion for an intellectual, 
high-minded, pure-hearted woman, you 
will not go far wrong." Keep her in 
mind always, or, if you are not imagina- 
tive enough for that, remember that the 
lines 
'^ No spring nor summer's beauty hath such grace 

As I have seen in one autumnal face " 

were written of a good man's mother. 



FROM 

PRINCIPLES OF 

PSYCHOLOGY 



HABIT 

This is a part of the chapter on Habit from the 
** Principles of Psychology " by William James. The 
chapter is a remarkable scientific treatise as well as a 
literary classic. Unfortunately it is too long to be 
reprinted in full here. After dealing with the physio- 
logical aspects of the subject, Professor James con- 
cludes the essays with this passage. 

This brings us by a very natural transi- 
tion to the ethical implications of the law 
of habit. They are numerous and mo- 
mentous. Dr. Carpenter, from whose 
'* Mental Physiology'' we have quoted, 
has so prominently enforced the princi- 
ple that our organs grow to the way in 
which they have been exercised, and 
dwelt upon its consequences, that his 
book almost deserves to be called a 
work of edification, on this account 
alone. We need make no apology, then, 



226 HABIT 

for tracing a few of these consequences 
ourselves : 

^' Habit a second nature! Habit is 
ten times nature/' the Duke of Welling- 
ton is said to have exclaimed; and the 
degree to which this is true no one can 
probably appreciate as well as one who 
is a veteran soldier himself. The daily 
drill and the years of discipline end by 
fashioning a man completely over again, 
as to most of the possibilities of his con- 
duct. 

** There is a story, which is credible 
enough, though it may not be true, of a 
practical joker, who, seeing a discharged 
veteran carrying home his dinner, suddenly 
called out, 'Attention!' whereupon the man 
instantly brought his hands down, and lost 
his mutton and potatoes in the gutter. The 
drill had been thorough, and its effects had 
become embodied in the man's nervous 
structure." ^ 

1 Huxley's Elementary Lessons in Physiology, les- 
son XII. 



HABIT 227 

Riderless cavalry-horses, at many a 
battle, have been seen to come together 
and go through their customary evolu- 
tions at the sound of the bugle-call. 
Most trained domestic animals, dogs 
and oxen, and omnibus- and car-horses 
seem to be machines almost pure and 
simple, undoubtingly, unhesitatingly 
doing from minute to minute the duties 
they have been taught, and giving no 
sign that the possibility of an alterna- 
tive ever suggests itself to their mind. 
Men grown old in prison have asked to 
be readmitted after being once set free. 
In a railroad accident to a travelling 
menagerie in the United States some 
time in 1884, a tiger, whose cage had 
broken open, is said to have emerged, 
but presently crept back again, as if too 
much bewildered by his new responsi- 
bilities, so that he was without difficulty 
secured. 

Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel 
of society, its most precious conserva- 



228 HABIT 

tive agent. It alone is what keeps us all 
within the bounds of ordinance, and 
saves the children of fortune from the 
envious uprisings of the poor. It alone 
prevents the hardest and most repulsive 
walks of life from being deserted by 
those brought up to tread therein. It 
keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand 
at sea through the winter; it holds the 
miner in his darkness, and nails the 
countryman to his log-cabin and his 
lonely farm through all the months of 
snow; it protects us from invasion by 
the natives of the desert and the frozen 
zone. It dooms us all to fight out the 
battle of life upon the lines of our nur- 
ture or our early choice, and to make 
the best of a pursuit that disagrees, be- 
cause there is no other for which we are 
fitted, and it is too late to begin again. 
It keeps different social strata from 
mixing. Already at the age of twenty- 
five you see the professional mannerism 
settling down on the young commercial 



HABIT 229 

traveller, on the young doctor, on the 
young minister, on the young counsellor- 
at-law. You see the little lines of cleav- 
age running through the character, the 
tricks of thought, the prejudices, the 
ways of the ''shop,'' in a word, from 
which the man can by-and-by no more 
escape than his coat-sleeve can sud- 
denly fall into a new set of folds. On the 
whole, it is best he should not escape. It 
is well for the worM that in most of us, 
by the age of thirty, the character has 
set like plaster, and will never soften 
again. 

If the period between twenty and 
thirty is the critical one in the formation 
of intellectual and professional habits, 
the period below twenty is more import- 
ant still for the fixing of personal hab- 
its, properly so called, such as vocaliza- 
tion and pronunciation, gesture, motion, 
and address. Hardly ever is a language 
learned after twenty spoken without 
a foreign accent; hardly ever can a 



230 HABIT 

youth transferred to the society of his 
betters unlearn the nasaUty and other 
vices of speech bred in him by the asso- 
ciations of his growing years. Hardly 
ever, indeed, no matter how much 
money there be in his pocket, can he 
even learn to dress like a gentleman- 
born. The merchants offer their wares 
as eagerly to him as to the veriest 
''swell,'' but he simply cannot buy the 
right things. An invisible law, as strong 
as gravitation, keeps him within his or- 
bit, arrayed this year as he was the last; 
and how his better-bred acquaintances 
contrive to get the things they wear will 
be for him a mystery till his dying day. 
The great thing, then, in all educa- 
tion, is to make our nervous system our 
ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund 
and capitalize our acquisitions, and live 
at ease upon the interest of the fund. 
For this we must make automatic and 
habitual, as early as possible, as many 
useful actions as we cany and guard 



HABIT 231 

against the growing into ways that are 
likely to be disadvantageous to us, as 
we should guard against the plague. 
The more of the details of our daily life 
we can hand over to the effortless cus- 
tody of automatism, the more our 
higher powers of mind will be set free 
for their own proper work. There is no 
more miserable human being than one 
in whom nothing is habitual but indeci- 
sion, and for whom the lighting of every 
cigar, the drinking of every cup, the 
time of rising and going to bed every 
day, and the beginning of every bit of 
work, are subjects of express volitional 
deliberation. Full half the time of such 
a man goes to the deciding, or regretting, 
of matters which ought to be so in- 
grained in him as practically not to ex- 
ist for his consciousness at all. If there 
be such daily duties not yet ingrained 
in any one of my readers, let him begin 
this very hour to set the matter right. 
In Professor Bain's chapter on ''The 



232 HABIT 

Moral Habits'' there are some admir- 
able practical remarks laid down. Two 
great maxims emerge from his treat- 
ment. The first is that in the acquisi- 
tion of a new habit, or the leaving off of 
an old one, we must take care to launch 
ourselves with as strong and decided an 
initiative as possible. Accumulate all 
the possible circumstances which shall 
reinforce the right motives; put your- 
self assiduously in conditions that en- 
courage the new way; make engage- 
ments incompatible with the old; take 
a public pledge, if the case allows; in 
short, envelop your resolution with 
every aid you know. This will give your 
new beginning such a momentum that 
the temptation to break down will not 
occur as soon as it otherwise might; and 
every day during which a breakdown is 
postponed adds to the chances of its not 
occurring at all. 

The second maxim is : Never suffer an 
exception to occur till the new habit is se- 



HABIT 233 

curely rooted in your life. Each lapse is 
like the letting fall of a ball of string 
which one is carefully winding up; a 
single slip undoes more than a great 
many turns will wind again. Continuity 
of training is the great means of making 
the nervous system act infallibly right. 
As Professor Bain says: 

*'The peculiarity of the moral habits, con- 
tradistinguishing them from the intellectual 
acquisitions, is the presence of two hostile 
powers, one to be gradually raised into the 
ascendant over the other. It is necessary, 
above all things, in such a situation,never to 
lose a battle. Every gain on the wrong side 
undoes the effect of many conquests on the 
right. The essential precaution, therefore, 
is so to regulate the two opposing powers 
that the one may have a series of uninter- 
rupted successes, until repetition has forti- 
fied it to such a degree as to enable it to 
cope with the opposition, under any cir- 
cumstances. This is the theoretically best 
career of mental progress.'* 



234 HABIT 

The need of securing success at the 
outset IS imperative. Failure at first is 
apt to dampen the energy of all future 
attempts, whereas past experience of 
success nerves one to future vigor. 
Goethe says to a man who consulted 
him about an enterprise but mistrusted 
his own powers: ''Ach! you need only 
blow on your hands!'' And the remark 
illustrates the effect on Goethe's spirits 
of his own habitually successful career. 
Professor Baumann, from whom I bor- 
row the anecdote/ says that the collapse 
of barbarian nations when Europeans 
come among them is due to their despair 
of ever succeeding as the newcomers 
do in the larger tasks of life. Old ways 
are broken and new ones not formed. 
The question of '' tapering-off/' in aban- 
doning such habits as drink and opium- 
indulgence, comes in here, and is a ques- 
tion about which experts differ within 

^ See the admirable passage about success at the 
outset, in his Handbuch der Moral (1878), pp. 38-43. 



HABIT 235 

certain limits, and in regard to what 
may be best for an individual case. In 
the main, however, all expert opinion 
would agree that abrupt acquisition of 
the new habit is the best way, if there be 
a real possibility of carrying it out. We 
must be careful not to give the will so 
stiff a task as to insure its defeat at the 
very outset; but, provided one can stand 
it, a sharp period of suffering, and then 
a free time, is the best thing to aim at, 
whether in giving up a habit like that 
of opium, or in simply changing one's 
hours of rising or of work. It is surpris- 
ing how soon a desire will die of inani- 
tion if it be never fed. 

''One must first learn, unmoved, looking 
neither to the right nor left, to walk firmly 
on the straight and narrow path, before one 
can begin 'to make one's self over again.' 
He who every day makes a fresh resolve is 
like one who, arriving at the edge of the 
ditch he is to leap, forever stops and returns 
for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance 



236 HABIT 

there is no such thing as accumulation of the 
ethical forces possible, and to make this pos- 
sible, and to exercise us and habituate us in 
it, is the sovereign blessing of regular work,''^ 

A third maxim may be added to the 
preceding pair : Seize the very first possi- 
ble opportunity to act on every resolution 
you make, and on every emotional prompt- 
ing you may experience in the direction 
of the habits you aspire to gain. It is not 
in the moment of their forming, but in 
the moment of their producing motor 
effects, that resolves and aspirations 
communicate the new ' ' set '' to the brain. 
As the author last quoted remarks: 

**The actual presence of the practical op- 
portunity alone furnishes the fulcrum upon 
which the lever can rest, by means of which 
the moral will may multiply its strength, 
and raise itself aloft. He who has no solid 
ground to press against will never get be- 
yond the stage of empty gesture-making/' 

^ J. Bahnsen: Beitrdge zu Charakterologie (1867), 
vol. I, p. 209. 



HABIT 237 

No matter how full a reservoir of 
maxims one may possess and no matter 
how good one's sentiments may be, if one 
have not taken advantage of every con- 
crete opportunity to act one's character 
may remain entirely unaffected for the 
better. With mere good intentions, hell 
is proverbially paved. And this is an 
obvious consequence of the principles 
we have laid down. A ''character,'' as J. 
S. Mill says, ''is a completely fashioned 
will''; and a will, in the sense in which 
he means it, is an aggregate of tenden- 
cies to act in a firm and prompt and 
definite way upon all the principal 
emergencies of life. A tendency to act 
only becomes effectively ingrained in us 
in proportion to the uninterrupted fre- 
quency with which the actions actually 
occur, and the brain "grows" to their 
use. Every time a resolve or a fine glow 
of feeling evaporates without bearing 
practical fruit is worse than a chance 
lost; it works so as positively to hinder 



238 HABIT 

future resolutions and emotions from 
taking the normal path of discharge. 
There is no more contemptible type of 
human character than that of the nerve- 
less sentimentalist and dreamer, who 
spends his life in a weltering sea of sensi- 
bility and emotion, but who never does a 
manly concrete deed . Rousseau , inflam- 
ing all the mothers of France, by his 
eloquence, to follow Nature and nurse 
their babies themselves, while he sends 
his own children to the foundling hos- 
pital, is the classical example of what I 
mean. But every one of us in his meas- 
ure, whenever, after glowing for an 
abstractly formulated Good, he practi- 
cally ignores some actual case, among 
the squalid ''other particulars '' of which 
that same Good lurks disguised, treads 
straight on Rousseau's path. All Goods 
are disguised by the vulgarity of their 
concomitants, in this work-a-day world ; 
but woe to him who can only recognize 
them when he thinks them in their pure 



HABIT 239 

and abstract form ! The habit of exces- 
sive novel-reading and theatre-going 
will produce true monsters in this line. 
The weeping of a Russian lady over the 
fictitious personages in the play, while 
her coachman is freezing to death on the 
seat outside, is the sort of thing that 
everywhere happens on a less glaring 
scale. Even the habit of excessive in- 
dulgence in music, for those who are 
neither performers themselves nor musi- 
cally gifted enough to take it in a purely 
intellectual way, has probably a relax- 
ing effect upon the character. One be- 
comes filled with emotions which habit- 
ually pass without prompting to any 
deed, and so the inertly sentimental con- 
dition is kept up. The remedy would 
be, never to suffer one's self to have an 
emotion at a concert, without express- 
ing it afterward in some active way.^ 

1 See for remarks on this subject a readable arti- 
cle by Miss V. Scudder on ** Musical Devotees and 
Morals," in the Andover Review for January, 1887. 



240 HABIT 

Let the expression be the least thing in 
the world — speaking genially to one's 
aunt, or giving up one's seat in a horse- 
car, if nothing more heroic offers — but 
let it not fail to take place. 

These latter cases make us aware 
that it is not simply particular lines of 
discharge, but also general forms of dis- 
charge, that seem to be grooved out by 
habit in the brain. Just as, if we let our 
emotions evaporate, they get into a 
way of evaporating; so there is reason 
to suppose that if we often flinch from 
making an effort, before we know it the 
effort-making capacity will be gone; 
and that, if we suffer the wandering of 
our attention, presently it will wander 
all the time. Attention and effort are, 
as we shall see later, but two names for 
the same psychic fact. To what brain- 
processes they correspond we do not 
know. The strongest reason for believ- 
ing that they do depend on brain-pro- 
cesses at all, and are not pure acts of 



HABIT 241 

the spirit, is just this fact, that they 
seem in some degree subject to the law 
of habit, which is a material law. As 
a final practical maxim, relative to these 
habits of the will, we may, then, offer 
something like this : Keep the faculty of 
effort alive in you by a little gratuitous 
exercise every day. That is, be systema- 
tically ascetic or heroic in little unneces- 
sary points, do every day or two some- 
thing for no other reason than that you 
would rather not do it, so that when the 
hour of dire need draws nigh, it may 
find you not unnerved and untrained to 
stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is 
like the insurance which a man pays on 
his house and goods. The tax does him 
no good at the time, and possibly may 
never bring him a return. But if the 
fire does come, his having paid it will be 
his salvation from ruin. So with the 
man who has daily inured himself to 
habits of concentrated attention, ener- 
getic volition, and self-denial in unneces- 



242 HABIT 

sary things. He will stand like a tower 
when everything rocks around him, and 
when his softer fellow-mortals are win- 
nowed like chaff in the blast. 

The physiological study of mental 
conditions is thus the most powerful 
ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be 
endured hereafter, of which theology 
tells, is no worse than the hell we make 
for ourselves in this world by habitually 
fashioning our characters in the wrong 
way. Could the young but realize how 
soon they will become mere walking 
bundles of habits, they would give more 
heed to their conduct while in the plas- 
tic state. We are spinning our own fates, 
good or evil, and never to be undone. 
Every smallest stroke of virtue or of 
vice leaves its never so little scar. The 
drunken Rip Van Winkle, in Jefferson's 
play, excuses himself for every fresh 
dereliction by saying, ''I won't count 
this time!'' Well! he may not count it, 
and a kind Heaven may not count it: 



HABIT 243 

but It is being counted none the less. 
Down among his nerve-cells and fibres 
the molecules are counting it, register- 
ing and storing it up to be used against 
him when the next temptation comes. 
Nothing we ever do, is, in strict scien- 
tific literalness, wiped out. Of course, 
this has its good side as well as its bad 
one. As we become permanent drunk- 
ards by so many separate drinks, so we 
become saints in the moral, and author- 
ities and experts in the practical and sci- 
entific spheres, by so many separate 
acts and hours of work. Let no youth 
have any anxiety about the upshot of 
his education, whatever the line of it 
may be. If he keep faithfully busy each 
hour of the working-day, he may safely 
leave the final result to itself. He can 
with perfect certainty count on waking 
up some fine morning, to find himself 
one of the competent ones of his genera- 
tion, in whatever pursuit he may have 
singled out. Silently, between all the 



244 HABIT 

details of his business, the power ofjudg" 
ing in all that class of matter will have 
built itself up within him as a possession 
that will never pass away. Young peo- 
ple should know this truth in advance. 
The ignorance of it has probably engen- 
dered more discouragement and faint- 
heartedness in youths embarking on 
arduous careers than all other causes 
put together. 



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